Improving and maintaining good voice quality has always been a problem for voice communication carriers. Every wireless carrier faces the problem of delivering consistent, improved voice quality. All techniques for improving voice quality are aimed at improving core network performance by reducing latency, jitter, echo cancellation, and improving RF conditions by doing drive tests and measuring holes in the coverage map. These drive tests are expensive. There are various techniques for measuring voice Quality. For example, an intrusive method creates a call between a source and a destination, inserts a signal, and compares the signal received at the destination with that at the source. Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) is one of the methods that rely on this technique. Another subjective technique makes a live call, and lets a group of people involved in those calls rate the conversation on a scale of 1 to 5, for example. A score (e.g., Mean Opinion Score (MoS)) is then created out of the aggregate score. A third technique by the ITU (International Telecommunication Union) is an objective modeling tool (called the E-model) that is used to predict voice quality It takes into account bit-error rates (BER), terminal characteristics, characteristics of the codec used, latency, jitter, and many other parameters, to predict voice quality.
A mobile terminal (e.g., a cellular telephone) does not suddenly experience loss of the communication link; rather, its radio signal fades slowly as the user moves the terminal towards the hole (reduced coverage area). Thus, the user/subscriber is in the best position to help carriers improve their coverage by providing some sort of feedback to the carrier. This allows a carrier to identify problem areas affecting voice quality and establish an automated way of addressing it.
There remains an unmet need that allows a party to a call to provide feedback during the call as to the voice quality.